After a frustrating development cycle we're back. With a new site. You may not notice many if any changes. It's mostly been fixing problems back-end with the system and putting in new features for our members. We do now have some public features that should make things more interesting. Including the projects pages!

The site layout will remain the same for the time being as I have too many other projects to be getting on with.

Just something I was playing around with today that I thought I might share.

I was curious about how to get network statistics in windows so I've been reading MSDN all day trying to work it out. I've written a little bit of python using the ctypes module to access the API on network statistics. All I can say is that doing these things on Linux is so much easier as you can just access the /proc directory and parse the system files there that contain such information.

Months ago I was required to design and model some part of computer system architecture. I decided to do a very small microcode processor.

For those who are unfamiliar with microcode allow me to explain the significance. In computer system design there are two approaches to designing instruction decoders. The first is called the hardwired approach. For each possible instruction in our instruction set the decoder designers spend a lot of time with truth tables. Each bit in the instruction is mapped through logic pathways to produce an appropriate result on the processor control lines. This is a very efficient decoding approach as instructions are decoded extremely fast. The problem is that if you change the instruction set or even modify the components in the processor, the decoder will need a complete overhaul. This becomes expensive.

The second approach is called microcoding. Here we design a dynamic instruction set that can be reprogrammed (called microprogramming believe it or not). The idea is that we store the entire instruction set and the values of each control line in a very small very fast memory device. When an instruction enters the decoder, the decoder simply looks up the values of the control lines for the input instruction and writes them out onto the bus. This is not as fast as a hardwired approach because memory devices have much greater latency than logic gates however it makes changing the instruction set (adding, removing or modifying instructions) very easy. We don't have to spend a lot of time completely redesigning the decoder whenever we add, remove or modify other components in our system. We simply reconfigure the decoder to behave differently when it receives an instruction.

After looking for a way to import Python modules when given a valid filepath I came across a description of a technique to do so here.

What I did not like about this approach was the use of null_module. In his approach you needed to have a module called null_module somewhere in your PYTHONPATH. This was then cloned and the information about the actual module you wish to report overwrites this module. In short, he was using null_module as a skeleton module for the import. This is unnecessary.

During my recent struggle with the JavaScript canvas object I was looking for a method to draw ellipses. Originally I was trying to use the arcTo() and even got desperate enough to have a quick play around with the bezierCurveTo() and quadraticCurveTo( ) functions before the obvious solution dawned on me.

In the event anybody else wastes their times looking for a way to do this try the following:

After taking significant time to be lazy & forgotful I have reconfigured the apache to run the nullnetwork image paste tool again (available at http://imagepaste.nullnetwork.net/). All are free to contribute to the gallery.